ingenious gentleman, in support of
this theory, instances Cow Castle (or Cae Castle), near Simonsbath,
which is a large British camp in the centre of Exmoor, and juxtaposes
with it Showlsborough Castle, a few miles away, just beyond the limits
of Exmoor, which is held to be a Roman camp, and where certainly two
Roman swords have been found within recent years, advancing this as
proof that a serious campaign between Romans and Britons was fought
across Exmoor.

All these are interesting speculations; one hesitates to dismiss a
theory because of its apparent unlikeliness, until it has been proved
wrong, for in this unrecorded past of ours so many things are possible;
nevertheless, it seems to me difficult to believe that the Romans would
have or could have burnt forty to sixty thousand acres of
woodland--above all, in a climate so humid and a country so well
watered as ours.

Exmoor is not generally heather-covered, but its tors and hillsides are
clothed with a wiry colourless grass and the hardy, prickly furze.
Heather grows abundantly on its boundaries, and above all on the common
lands, such as Brendon Common, Lynton, and Parracombe Common, which
surround it, and which are distinguished from the moorland proper.
Native agriculturists say, I believe, that the heather grows to its
finest on land which has been turned up by man's labour--like nettles,
which grow so wildly in deserted gardens and ruined villages--and that
this common land on the edge of the moor bears evidence of having once
been cultivated. With the break-up of the feudal system, certainly, at
the beginning of the sixteenth century, much land in England went out
of cultivation with the abolition of forced labour, and became
pasturage or mere rough common. The people around here say that, if
you turn up a strip of land on Exmoor, where nothing grows but grass
and furze, and leave it, in a year or so the heather will come. But
that heather, unlike nettles, does not grow only where the land has
been turned by the plough is proved enough by the heather which grows
on steep hillsides, such as the Scotch mountains or Dunkery Beacon,
which can never have been brought under cultivation.

To all who live in the West Country, who says Exmoor says "the red
deer." This is the last corner in England where the red deer, an
ancient and native inhabitant of these islands, lives in his natural
state, and where he can be hunted with the freedom, and yet with the
t